About the artist

You may not know his face (yet), but you probably know his work. Charlie Puth is a singer, songwriter, and producer who has written and produced songs for an array of A-list pop and urban artists, including Jason Derulo, Stevie Wonder, Meghan Trainor and Trey Songz among others. Most recently, Puth co-wrote, co-produced and sings the hook on Wiz Khalifa’s chart-topping hip-hop anthem “See You Again,” which plays in the final scene of the motion picture Furious 7 and is a highlight of the soundtrack. “See You Again” has reached No. 1 in over 90 countries across the globe including the U.S., with the coveted No. 1 positions on the Billboard Hot 100 and Shazam.

Puth himself is the real deal, a multi-talented vocalist, musician, producer, and versatile songwriter who shuttles easily between the pop and urban realms. Puth first fell in love with music growing up by the shore in Rumson, New Jersey. “I didn’t grow up wealthy,” he says. “We couldn't even afford spaghetti sauce when I was first born, but my mom and dad worked really hard and came from the bottom up.” He credits his supportive parents for his early music education, citing his idol James Taylor as his primary influence. “My mom would put headphones on her belly and play his records to me while she was pregnant,” he says. Later on, Puth’s father exposed him to R&B artists like Barry White, The Isley Brothers, and Marvin Gaye, while his mother, a piano teacher, played him classical music and began teaching him piano when he was four years old.

Puth played piano throughout his childhood and began studying jazz at the age of 10. As a high school student, he spent his Saturdays commuting into the city to study classical and jazz at Manhattan School of Music in Harlem. “I thought I was going to be a jazz piano player, but I always had an interest in pop because my parents would listen to all this pop music,” he recalls. “I always tried to incorporate pop elements into the jazz I was playing.” Puth began listening to more and more pop, fascinated by the way it was produced, especially Max Martin’s late ’90s work, which led him to buy his first music production keyboard at age 11 and start making his own CDs. In sixth grade, he recorded and produced his own Christmas album, which he sold door to door in his town. “I made $600 and donated the proceeds to my local church,” he says with a laugh. “I designed the artwork and put all the jewel cases together; I was really into the whole process.” Shortly after, Puth began writing his own songs and eventually posting them on YouTube, along with covers.

In 2011, Ellen DeGeneres tapped Puth and a friend to appear on her show after a cover they did of Adele’s “Someone Like You” for a Perez Hilton covers contest went viral. Puth appeared on the show twice and watched his international fanbase grow both on and offline. “It got me in front of 30 million people,” he says of the experience. “It pushed me into a different area I never thought I would reach.”Now the New Jersey-born and bred Puth is ready to step out as an artist in his own right with his self-produced debut single “Marvin Gaye,” a sultry blend of Motown-influenced pop and hip-hop-flavored beats that feels like an instant classic. “I was a big fan of Marvin Gaye growing up,” Puth says. “Some of my favorite songs of his are ‘Heaven Must Have Sent You,’ ‘Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,’ ‘Sexual Healing,’ and ‘Heard It Through The Grapevine.’ I was inspired by the soulful feeling he evoked through his music and wanted to bring that quality to my record.” Lyrically, Puth says he wants “Marvin Gaye” to be like sonic courage. “I want a dude like me who's shy to hear the record and have the courage to go up to a girl and just kiss her or something crazy like that. I want people to hear it and be spontaneous, to act on what they feel they can’t feel. It’s like musical assistance.”

Helping Puth deliver that assistance on “Marvin Gaye” is his duet partner Meghan Trainor. “Meghan got involved after we were hanging out at a party one night in Los Angeles,” Puth says. “I played the song for her, she loved it, and said that she could absolutely kill it if I let her sing on it. Of course I’m going to let Meghan Trainor sing on it! Her vocal put the bow on the whole record. She brought such a soulful element.” Trainor also appears in “Marvin Gaye”’s prom-themed, spontaneous-make-out-filled video. Puth returned the favor by making a cameo in the video for Trainor’s latest single “Dear Future Husband.” He will also join her as support on her Mtrain Tour this summer.

“Marvin Gaye” was the first song Puth wrote the day he arrived in California for a writing trip after signing his publishing deal. On his second day he wrote “See You Again” with DJ Frank E (Kanye West, Lupe Fiasco). “It felt like we unlocked something magical that day,” Puth says of the poignant song that plays over Furious 7’s closing montage of late actor Paul Walker and his character Brian O’Connor. “I’ve always been a fan of the franchise and was honored to have the opportunity to take a turn at writing Paul’s tribute song. I lost a close friend of mine in a similar way and was able to tap into that emotion of losing someone but still having hope. Seeing everyone’s reaction to the song has been unreal.”

Puth looks set to reach an even bigger audience with his killer combo of “Marvin Gaye” and “See You Again.” He is also hard at work on writing, recording and producing his debut album for Atlantic Records, which promises to deliver even more of his old-meets-new musical charm. “I've never been more proud of what I’m doing,” Puth says. “Usually when I’d write a song, I’d be too shy to play it, but I’ve never been so confident about playing these songs for people, and that’s a great feeling to have.”

Albums

Voicenotes is the second studio album by American singer and songwriter Charlie Puth. The album was released by Atlantic Records on May 11, 2018. The album is entirely produced by Puth himself. Five singles have been released in support of the album, including "Attention" and "How Long".Puth delayed the album from an early 2018 release date to "perfect" it, including reshooting the album cover. He announced on social media that he would release the album cover and the song "The Way I Am" on May 3. Puth will also embark on the Voicenotes Tour in support of the album in North America throughout July and August 2018.

Nine Track Mind is the debut studio album by American singer Charlie Puth. It was released on January 29, 2016, by Atlantic Records, after being scheduled to be released on November 6, 2015. Puth has produced throughout the album.The album's lead single, "Marvin Gaye", which features Meghan Trainor, was originally released as "Some Type of Love's" only single on February 10, 2015, and peaked at number 21 on the Billboard Hot 100 and topped the charts in various countries including France, Ireland, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. The album's second single, "One Call Away", was released on August 20, 2015, reaching as high as number 12 on the Billboard Hot 100. On May 24, 2016, Puth released the third and final single "We Don't Talk Anymore", featuring Selena Gomez, with it having peaked at number 9 on the Billboard Hot 100. A music video for "Dangerously" was released on November 2, 2016.The finalized track listing was revealed on December 11, 2015. The final track listing removed the tracks "Know Your Name" and "Hard" and replaced them with "Dangerously" and "We Don't Talk Anymore".

Nine Track Mind is the debut studio album by American singer Charlie Puth. It was released on January 29, 2016, by Atlantic Records, after being scheduled to be released on November 6, 2015. Puth has produced throughout the album.The album's lead single, "Marvin Gaye", which features Meghan Trainor, was originally released as "Some Type of Love's" only single on February 10, 2015, and peaked at number 21 on the Billboard Hot 100 and topped the charts in various countries including France, Ireland, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. The album's second single, "One Call Away", was released on August 20, 2015, reaching as high as number 12 on the Billboard Hot 100. On May 24, 2016, Puth released the third and final single "We Don't Talk Anymore", featuring Selena Gomez, with it having peaked at number 9 on the Billboard Hot 100. A music video for "Dangerously" was released on November 2, 2016.The finalized track listing was revealed on December 11, 2015. The final track listing removed the tracks "Know Your Name" and "Hard" and replaced them with "Dangerously" and "We Don't Talk Anymore".

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Trainor’s other goal was to write chatty lyrics that would reach a wide cross-section of listeners. “A fan came up to me once and said, ‘Yo, thank you for writing the way we speak,’ so I made sure every song was like a conversation and what someone might actually say,” she explains. The lyrical tone is in keeping with the relatability of her story-telling, with songs about the morning after a hook-up (“Walkashame”), tipsy texting (“3am”), and shady, lying exes (Top 5 second single “Lips Are Movin”). Entertainment Weekly has called Title “Real-girl pop with massive charm.”

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“This whole album is me, who I am and how I want to be seen as an artist,” says Dua Lipa. “I want people to really get to know me, so the album is everything that has happened in my life so far, and every song tells a different story.”

She may be young, but Lipa has plenty of stories to tell. The London-born child of Kosovar parents, she has already been nominated for awards by the BBC and MTV Europe, and was a finalist for the prestigious “Critics’ Choice” prize at the Brit Awards. She also won Best New Artist at the NME Awards, and two European Border Breakers Awards—she was one of only ten global recipients of the EBBA—including the night’s biggest prize, the “Public Choice” award, voted on by fans.

Her strong presence onstage (indicated by her European Festival Award for Best Newcomer of the Year) immediately separates her from so many emerging pop acts. But with 3.5 million in global sales, it’s her singles that have rapidly established her as a rising star—"Be the One" reached the Top Ten in a dozen European territories, "Hotter Than Hell" hit the Top Twenty in the UK, and “Blow Your Mind (Mwah)” climbed into Billboard’s Top 25 in the US. All of this, mind you, before putting out her first album.

Now, with the release of Dua Lipa, she reveals the full range of her ambitions—not just the dance-floor fire of her singles, but also a more introspective side. “I’ve been describing it as ‘dark pop’ because people have only heard the pop moments, but there are some really dark, singer-songwriter parts that I’m excited about,” she says.

Before Lipa was born, her father was a pop star in his native Kosovo; growing up, she absorbed the music of his favorite artists—Radiohead, Oasis, Stereophonics, Sting. Meanwhile, she was still a regular pop-obsessed kid, singing along to Destiny’s Child and S Club 7 (“stuff that you’d listen with your friends”) and especially Nelly and Pink. Those singers stood out, she says, for their “coolness and honesty—it was pop music, but there was something real about it.”

She attended the Sylvia Young Theater School until she was 11, when she and her family moved back to Kosovo, a country which she considers much more complex than its war-torn image. “Kosovo is changing and evolving so much,” she says. “It’s still very poor, there’s lot of places that are really run-down, but every time I go back there’s something new and better happening. There’s so much talent there, and people are starting to find out about it.”

Encouraged by a teacher who would make her perform Alicia Keys and Toni Braxton hits in school, Lipa began to think about singing—which had always been her “playground dream”—more seriously, and convinced her parents to let her move back to London when she was 15. Living with friends, she made it through high school, but failed her first year of A Levels as partying took priority over attendance.

Too ashamed to tell her friends (“I felt so bad, I just wanted to cover it up”), Lipa applied the same tenacity that has propelled her career ever since: She found an intensive one-year study program, got straight As, and was accepted into four universities. Though she wanted to prove that she could meet these academic challenges, her commitment to her music and her vision never wavered.

“I always told myself never to have a plan B - I feel like that's also one of the reasons I'm doing what I'm doing now, because I have never thought about doing anything else.”

Lipa was working in a restaurant, recording covers and posting them on social media, trying to find a way into the music business, when she was noticed on the street by a modeling agency. “Some of my friends were doing it,” she says. “But I was never put up for any good jobs, just random salons and whatever. And they said ‘If you want to do this properly, you need to lose a lot of weight.’ I tried to do it at first, but it made me very unhappy and caused me a lot of issues, a lot of body confidence problems. Modeling sounds so glamorous, but it really wasn’t a successful thing for me.”

"Every woman should have the privilege to love their body and feel sexy just the way they are,” she continues. “Being able to spread that message and to support all my girls who need to be told they’re fucking hot and that they don’t need to change for anyone inspires me and makes me feel I am exactly where I need to be.”

One thing the agency did accomplish, though, was securing Lipa an audition for a commercial for The X Factor—and when her voice appeared in the ad, she eventually drew the attention of a management team working with Lana Del Rey. She signed a deal that allowed her to quit the restaurant and go from working on demos in her spare moments to focusing on recording.

“I always had a really clear idea of what I liked and what I didn’t, which made the process easier,” she says. During her years in Kosovo, she became a huge hip-hop fan; a Method Man/Redman show was her first concert. “I wanted to bring in my love for hip-hop and find some middle ground,’ she says. “Lyrically, the songs have more of a flow—especially ‘Bad Together’ and ‘Last Dance,’ where it’s really fast-paced, like I’m singing a rap but I have a pop chorus. That was always the goal.”

Lipa says that “Hotter Than Hell,” written before she got signed, was the first time she felt in command of her songwriting, but points to “Garden of Eden” as a turning point. “It kind of wrote itself,” she says. “All I had to do was set it off and be open and honest, and the story just happened.”

While recording Dua Lipa in New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, and London, she was rapidly learning the fearlessness and confidence necessary to write great songs. She says that more personal songs like “Genesis” and “No Goodbyes” indicate where her life is right now.

Lipa recently concluded her first tour, opening for Troye Sivan in the US and headlining dates of her own in the UK. Other than a brief panic attack during her very first show (“luckily people found it endearing, but I was terrified,” she says), performing live quickly became comfortable territory. “I can really be creative and let loose onstage,” she says. “Be really free, just go for it and enjoy it, and get lost in what I’m doing.” The critics instantly took notice: NPR said that she “hypnotized” on stage, while Idolator called her “completely badass” and SPIN raved “she’s headliner material—catch her while you can.”

Perhaps the most emotional experience in Dua Lipa’s young career was her triumphant return to Kosovo for a concert last summer. The appearance drew an astonishing 18,000 fans, and the singer needed a police escort to get from her family’s residence to the venue. “It was the craziest moment of my life,” she says. “Just so insane and so much fun.”

She used the proceeds from the homecoming show to create the Sunny Hill Foundation, named for the neighborhood where her parents reside. “We’re going to give to different charities every month for the youth of Kosovo,” she says. “I just want to do my part, because they’ve done so much for me there.”

This kind of hands-on involvement carries over to Lipa’s relationship with her fans, including close communication on social media and collaborations with her followers on merchandise design. A small group of dedicated Twitter followers rapidly grew into a community too big to keep up with as much as she would like. “We talk about all kinds of things on Twitter, though it’s getting harder now to reply to everything,” she says. “They can tell my moods from my tweets—they ask if I’m feeling OK.”

The songs on Dua Lipa announce the arrival of a new force in pop—irresistible on the dance floor, thoughtful under closer inspection, constantly discovering creative possibilities. “I’ve grown a lot as a writer,” Lipa says. “It used to take me a really long time to write a song, but now it’s easier to be more open and say what I’m thinking without having to filter or hide from the people I’m in the room with. Just learning who I am and being able to tell a story.”

Edward Christopher "Ed" Sheeran is an English singer-songwriter and musician. Born in Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire and raised in Framlingham, Suffolk, he moved to London in 2008 to pursue his music career on the Artist Development course at Access to Music. In early 2011, Sheeran released an independent extended play, No. 5 Collaborations Project, which caught the attention of both Elton John and Jamie Foxx. He then signed to Asylum Records. His debut album, +, containing the singles "The A Team" and "Lego House", was certified 6× Platinum in the UK. In 2012, Sheeran won two Brit Awards for Best British Male Solo Artist and British Breakthrough Act. "The A Team" won the British Academy's Ivor Novello Award for Best Song Musically and Lyrically. In 2014, he was nominated for Best New Artist at the 56th Annual Grammy Awards. Sheeran's popularity abroad began in 2012. In the US he made a guest appearance on Taylor Swift's fourth studio album, Red, and wrote songs for One Direction. "The A Team" was nominated for Song of the Year at the 2013 Grammy Awards and he performed the song in duet with Elton John during the ceremony.

Louis William Tomlinson is an English singer-songwriter and talent show judge. He is known as a member of the boy band One Direction. Tomlinson began his career as an actor, appearing in ITV drama film If I Had You and the BBC drama Waterloo Road. In 2010, he became a member of One Direction after being eliminated as a solo contestant on the British music competition series The X Factor. One Direction has since released five albums, embarked on four world tours, and won several awards, becoming one of most successful musical groups of all time."Just Hold On" was released as Tomlinson's debut single as a solo artist in December 2016, it peaked at number two on the UK Singles Chart and was certified gold in both the UK and US. In 2017, Tomlinson released "Back to You" with American singer Bebe Rexha and "Miss You".In 2013, Tomlinson was signed as a footballer by Doncaster Rovers of the Football League Championship on a non-contract basis. The same year he also formed his own record label, Triple Strings, as an imprint of One Direction's label Syco. He appeared on Debrett's 2017 list of the most influential people in the UK.